The Mythotechnics of Meaning: 1 Myth as World-Cut: Carving Possibility into an Inhabitable Universe

We have been trained to think of stories as mirrors. Tales reflect the world, or so we are told: a narrative is a lens, a window, a faithful transcription of reality. But this is a mistake of the first order — one that has seduced centuries of philosophy, anthropology, and literary criticism.

Stories do not reflect. Stories cut.

Every myth, legend, ritual, and cultural tale is a semiotic incision into potential. It selects, arranges, and stabilises certain possibilities while leaving others dormant, unrealised, unimagined. To live within a civilisation is to inhabit a lattice of such cuts: a relational landscape where each narrative exerts a gravitational pull on thought, action, and perception.

Consider the mythic structures underlying ancient empires. The stories of gods, kings, and cosmic order were not idle entertainments; they were operative constraints, shaping political legitimacy, social cohesion, and moral expectation. Each story was a potential actualised — not in an individual mind, but across collectives, time, and space.

From a relational perspective, a myth is a patterned alignment of potentialities. It is not about a world; it sculpts a world. It is a topology of possibility: some paths are weighted, some trajectories prohibited, others invisible until the story makes them thinkable. In effect, the world we inhabit is the world our stories have cut for us.

This is not merely an elegant metaphor. It is an ontological claim:

• A myth actualises potentials, giving shape to social, ecological, and cognitive arrangements.

• It generates semiotic gravity: collectives coalesce along the contours of repeated construals.

• It prescribes how the world can be interacted with, not how it is “out there” waiting to be represented.

Reading history through this lens changes everything. Collapse, revolution, renaissance — these are not anomalies or failures of human judgment. They are shifts in relational topology: the stories that once held a world together weaken, fragment, or are replaced, and the potential landscape reconfigures accordingly.

In short, myth is not a mirror. It is the chisel, the incision, the scaffold. It is the very process by which a collective inhabits possibility. To study myth as a world-cut is to study the semiotic anatomy of civilisation itself.

And if this sounds unsettling — good. You are beginning to see the world not as given, but as carved, maintained, and negotiable. The cuts are real. The world is what the stories make it.